Marius Böttcher
Ehem. Junior Fellow

Vita

Marius Böttcher studied media design (BFA.) and media culture (Diploma) at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, was student-assistant of (DEFA-Director) Günter Reisch, worked for different film projects and was co-publisher of the Kinoheft. Till today he works as a cinematographer for different TV and movie productions. Since February 2010 he is a Junior Fellow at the IKKM.

Dated from 2010; please click here for current information on Marius Böttcher.

PhD-project: Construction sites in DEFA-filmOn the emergence and disappearance of things. Building sites and ruins in DEFA films.

The building site as location for intersecting layers of space and time can, in cinematographic terms, not only be reconstructed here, but recorded at the very moment of its emergence. The filmic no man’s lands, makeshift solutions and construction plans simulate transformations which allow the emergence and collapse of things to be observed as a completion of the incomplete objects on the screen. What happens when the unfinished buildings offer an unobstructed view of the landscape? What is the film’s attitude to the things which are not yet visible? The not-yet-places of the fallow land between finished building projects and surveyed building sites, the presence of the virtual, the emergence of a process which in its truest sense aims solely at disappearance. The building site is defined by objects, implements and technical devices which seek not just to break it up but to eliminate it completely.

With this, a space is revealed which is limited, designed and only thus made present – only to then be placed in a new visibility. Not only is a new orientation of inside and outside, visibility and absence being enacted here, however; the threshold of the temporal is also moving considerably closer. It is this moment of historicity which, particularly when considering the filmic building sites, becomes relevant to the project. Thus the DEFA’s building sites, in contrast to the international cinema of modernity, evidently deal with this particularly judiciously. But what does it matter that this approach is so obviously different?

The work at the fault line which is to be pursued here involves a hunt for clues between these very construction plans, architectural models, detonations, fragments of wall and ruins. These are architectural remains which apparently experience a historicity, which spread out as a juxtaposition in the image of the DEFA and pile up on top of each other, in such a way that, at the edges of concrete structures, between new buildings and ruined remains of old ones, it is these amorphous overlappings and gaps which seek to look at temporality in a different way. The project aims to focus more closely on this, considering the building site both in general, cinematographically speaking, and as a central motif of DEFA films in particular.